Information services are becoming increasingly popular in the wireless service market as they can provide subscribers with up-to-date information on stocks, sports, news, and the like. To increase the value of these services it is helpful to customize them for each individual subscriber. Customization is not desirable, however, if it requires a large increase in the amount of traffic traveling over the air.
In prior art wireless communication systems, information services providers have broadcast data to an information service address which the subscriber unit uses to identify information. If the subscriber unit has the address activated in its registry, it reads and processes the data. The display of the data, however, has not been configurable by the end-user.
In a similar vein, prior art wireless communication systems have begun to support access to the Internet. Wireline techniques and protocols for Internet access have been tried in wireless systems, but have encountered problems. The technique of requesting a single WEB page (or portion of a page) and then displaying the page (or portion) before requesting another page (or another portion of the same page), as currently used in the wireline protocols, can introduce excessive latency in store-and-forward wireless systems. This is because such systems must queue each response until adequate air time becomes available to transmit the response.
One prior art technique, known as the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), has partially addressed the latency problem by sending multiple WEB pages, for example, in a single transmission as a "deck" of "cards," each card corresponding to a page of structured content and navigation specifications. Each WAP card, however, has combined the data to be displayed, with formatting instructions used in controlling the display of the data, thereby disadvantageously causing data downloads to be larger than necessary whenever the data uses a fixed display format.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus in a wireless communication system for controlling a display of data by a portable subscriber unit. In particular, what is needed is a method and apparatus that can reduce the size of data downloads and that can allow customization the display of the data according to the desires of the enduser.